Sometimes the hysterical quality in British 'investigative' journalism really makes me laugh.  It is a cliche that any report about something that you know about will have nothing to do with reality - and yet we happily accept media reports on subjects about which we know little or nothing as a reliable source.

Of course, we all rewrite history, fantasise and like to tell a good story - me as much as anyone else - but, without getting all po-faced about it, the power to shape the thoughts and feelings of millions carries some responsibility.

This Blog and other initiatives of ours often try to unravel some of what we have called 'group-think' by giving a new perspective on current events.  It is not that our perspective is always 'right' but that it is wise to consider other perspectives before leaping in with unconditional tribal support for your country, your faith leaders or your party.

These thoughts were especially salient with the report in yesterday's Sunday Times headlined: "Ken's aides 'in secret Marxist cell'" - an attack on the group around Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, especially his economic adviser, Redmond O'Neill. 

The context, of course, is that the Mayoral Elections are coming up. We have already seen an expose by Andrew Gilligan of the Evening Standard of the conduct of one of Livingstone's staff.  Other information we have suggests that what Gilligan has raised is a matter for legitimate concern and the issues have not yet been satisfactorily been dealt with by the Mayor's Office.

Let me make my interest clear. I, once and briefly, advised Livingstone's team during the period when he was trying to stop an unwarranted attempt to stop him from running for Mayor by the New Labour machine - a close knit cadre if ever there was one. The ironies abound.

He left the Labour Party to stand on his own. I left his campaign because I considered (then) that he should not stand against Labour. He then won. I left Labour (though I am back, though lord knows for how much longer) for a variety of reasons, largely to do with process rather than policy. Labour then brought him back into the fold and now he is bosom buddies with the Brown establishment. Such is political life.

My view of Livingstone is that he is highly talented and very intelligent but not a team worker.  His policies are of the authoritarian Left and neglect the indigenous population in favour of giving special favours to ethnic and other identity groups in his coalition. 

Similarly, he is far too much into the circuses part of the 'bread and circuses' aspect of politics but, I concede, he has governed London, with limited powers, in such a way that it is deservedly seen as a world class city that is relatively safe and very vibrant. The fact that it destabilises the economy of the rest of the country is not his fault but the Government's.

So, I respect him but do not 'support' him. The Tory choice of Boris Johnson to oppose him must count as one of the most ill-judged and eccentric decisions in contemporary politics.

Similarly, I have never had time for the Marxism of his advisory team - or the cod-Marxism that underpinned New Labour. Karl Marx was a genius with important insights into society and its structures. There are others who have used Marxist ideology effectively for organisation and the development of new thinking.

Unfortunately, Marxism as a philosophy just does not stand up to scrutiny as anything more than an imposition of yet another unnecessary essentialism on the human condition. Marxists have tended to the lowest common denominator - ideas displacing humanity as power is acquired so that the camps and terror become logical outgrowths of its tendency to centralised command organisation.

And yet, and yet - I have actually worked with the person pilloried by the Sunday Times and its article does not ring true - or rather it sounds like what it is, a bit of political opportunism without context or analysis. 

This or that allegation made by the source [Atma Singh] I cannot vouch for, but two aspects of interpretation do not accord with personal experience - so that this article becomes, like so much in the national media, a case study in 'truth' or the lack of it.

The suggestion is that the Socialist Action membership of Redmond-O'Neill and other members of Livingstone's staff is 'news'. The implication is that Socialist Action is some kind of threat to the community because of its beliefs. The tone of the article suggests that we have here a sinister clique intent on seizure of power by non-democratic means.

Well this is what I know from my own dealings with Mr. O'Neill a decade ago.

Mr. O'Neill and the other Livingstone advisers' affiliation to the 'Trotskyist' (what exegesis that word requires!) Socialist Action is not 'news'. This fact and its close-knit nature was known to everyone in the London and indeed national Labour grassroots movement in the mid-1990s. It is not news.

While Socialist Action was one of many such grouplets on the Left, it operated, as a close-knit clique, no differently from those that eventually came to dominate New Labour or represented Atlanticist thinking such as that of (say) another group I knew well at the time, the Labour Finance & Industry Groups.

Small cliques are what politics has always been about. The Right is no different. Track the membership of the Warwick branch of the Federation of Conservative Students into the euro-sceptic movement or the New Times-Demos link within the New Labour faction and you will see what I mean. I've worked with both of these as well.

There is a more general issue for the public about the transparency and accountability of cliques but, if you do not accept as I do that our system is rotten, then cliques per se are only matters of concern if they are corrupt (which power generally encourages them to be) or they have levels of access that allow them to express their more outrageous fantasies through control of the levers of power ["oh, you mean like the neo-conservatives in the US ... "]

From this point of view, the clique around the initial New Labour faction should worry the public far more than Socialist Action. Perhaps Socialist Action is likely to have been 'corrupted' by now, but not because of what it believes per se but because of what it is - a grouplet with access to power that has been around too long.

But the real reason that Socialist Action is apparently running the Mayor's advisory network is actually quite simple and has nothing to do with their 'Trotskist ideology'.  It has everything to do with their competence and intelligence - they stand out like diamonds in the doo-doo in terms of simple ability to get things done effectively.

That is why Ken Livingstone makes use of this network. Not because he is a Trotskyist (he is not), but because this bunch of 'Trots' deliver for him and so, with the usual caveats, for London.

And why do I know that this group is both good and not very dangerous - why, if anything, they are being used rather than using the system?  Because I worked with Mr. O'Neill for about two years on a particular project and I learnt two things about him.

The first was that he was the finest political tactician and strategist that I have ever come across. He was immensely hard-working, intelligent and capable. Above all, he was honest.  He never broke a promise in a world where promises were created to be broken. He knew how to compromise.

The level of talent and intelligence was so superior that I had to ask myself why he was wasting his time (indeed why I was) on a political project that was quixotic.

The answer came from the second thing I learnt about him - he was a believer, much like an entrepreneur who has to believe in his idea if he is to build a business. In politics, as in business and as in every aspect of life, there are types - the managerial, the entrepreneurial, the creative, the blind follower. Redmond was and probably is a political entrepreneur.

In his case, he believed in a political philosophy that really irritates the establishment. He gave up (at that time) personal comfort, the opportunity to make money and considerable amounts of leisure to drive things in the direction he believed. 

In retrospect, I betrayed him. Why? Because I am not a believer but a pragmatist. The project could go only so far. When it ceased to be effective, I moved on with the mentality of the mercenary rather than the saint. Do I feel guilty? - no, of course not. My time in the City told me that if an investment is not working out, ditch it and move on.

But Redmond, whose political philosophy is (in my opinion) flawed but not malign, did not give up. He went on to stick with Livingstone and, alongside others, he helped to build a credible policy staff where other politicians have surrounded themselves with numskulls. 

In a liberal democratic society, he and his type are no more of a threat than any other small group of dedicated believers who can attach themselves to a rising politician and make things work for him. 

They are only a threat when the system starts to fail and allow such cliques power without restraint - no clique can do damage in the Mayor's Office but a clique that captures the Prime Minister's Office can perform mayhem on a global scale (as we have seen).

There are, in any case, such cliques everywhere. Every American neo-con in town is now attached to Giuliani, while Putin has his silovki. This is politics - cliques competing against cliques. And, up to a point, there is nothing wrong with like-minded people getting together to make things happen. 

There are only two questions to ask within the current system.  Are they competent?  Are they operating within the law?

Of course, if you are a regular reader, you would expect me to have further questions about the depth of democracy and about accountability and transparency in a political culture built on competing cliques.

Ironically, the political project in which I, as a relative right-winger, worked with this alleged 'Trot' was actually about democracy, accountability and transparency. If it had succeeded, it would have transformed politics from a culture of unaccountable cliques to one more transparent and accountable.

It was the critics of Socialist Action who preferred Government by clique. Can we blame Socialist Action for their subsequent adaptation to reality? Yet what of Socialist Action and its position in relation to our two questions? 

The competence question can be judged by the electorate in May as our democratic system dictates. The current round of media attention is only useful if it asks (as Andrew Gilligan has done) the simple question of whether the law has been broken or can point to substantive failures of competence or of policy. 

If there has been a breach of the law, the law should come down on this clique, as it should on any other clique in similar circumstances, 'like a ton of bricks'. Similarly, let us get the facts on competence by all means. But let's not prejudge.

There are two types of good journalism - that which investigates wrong-doing or exposes anomaly and that which informs and analyses.  There are two types of inferior journalism - that which presents an opinion (the 'commentariat') as a substitute for analysis and that which presents 'news' when it is really presenting material to protect or promote a stance.

As It Happens is very often inferior journalism - it enjoys its freebie forays into opinion because its clients pay for the real analysis - but its audience is small and tightly defined with the ability to make its own judgements on our credibility. We soon hear back if we get it really wrong and will tell you if we have.

What we do not need is more web activity that repeats the general round of agit-bloggery nor more mainstream journalism that parrots the political class with instant opinion. 

What we need is a fresh journalism that no longer obsesses about providing instant news access (since the internet provides this willy-nilly) or increasingly hyped up trivial 'angles' on popular stories (that's entertainment).

We need a journalism that offers us, instead, sustained and considered analysis and investigation of the context of news and of the options that we have for dealing with the issues on which we elect governments. But will we get it?

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